Subtitles and Transcript

Jeremy Jackson

0:12
I'm an ecologist,mostly a coral reef ecologist.I started out in Chesapeake Bayand went diving in the winterand became a tropical ecologist overnight.And it was really a lot of funfor about 10 years.I mean, somebody pays youto go around and traveland look at some of the mostbeautiful places on the planet.And that was what I did.

0:39
And I ended up in Jamaica,in the West Indies,where the coral reefs were reallyamong the most extraordinary, structurally,that I ever saw in my life.And this picture here,it's really interesting, it shows two things:First of all, it's in black and whitebecause the water was so clearand you could see so far,and film was so slowin the 1960s and early 70s,you took pictures in black and white.The other thing it shows youis that, although there's this beautifulforest of coral,there are no fish in that picture.

1:15
Those reefs at Discovery Bay, Jamaicawere the most studied coral reefsin the world for 20 years.We were the best and the brightest.People came to study our reefs from Australia,which is sort of funnybecause now we go to theirs.And the view of scientistsabout how coral reefs work, how they ought to be,was based on these reefswithout any fish.Then, in 1980,there was a hurricane, Hurricane Allen.I put half the labup in my house.The wind blew very strong.The waves were 25to 50 feet high.And the reefs disappeared, and new islands formed,and we thought, "Well, we're real smart.We know that hurricaneshave always happened in the past."And we published a paper in Science,the first time that anybody everdescribed the destructionon a coral reef by a major hurricane.And we predicted what would happen,and we got it all wrong.And the reason wasbecause of overfishing,and the fact that a last common grazer,a sea urchin, died.And within a few monthsafter that sea urchin dying, the seaweed started to grow.And that is the same reef;that's the same reef 15 years ago;that's the same reef today.The coral reefs of the north coast of Jamaicahave a few percent live coral coverand a lot of seaweed and slime.And that's more or less the storyof the coral reefs of the Caribbean,and increasingly, tragically,the coral reefs worldwide.

2:59
Now, that's my little, depressing story.All of us in our 60s and 70shave comparable depressing stories.There are tens of thousandsof those stories out there,and it's really hard to conjure upmuch of a sense of well-being,because it just keeps getting worse.And the reason it keeps getting worseis that after a natural catastrophe,like a hurricane,it used to be that there wassome kind of successional sequence of recovery,but what's going on now is thatoverfishing and pollution and climate changeare all interactingin a way that prevents that.And so I'm going to sort of go throughand talk about those threekinds of things.

3:48
We hear a lot aboutthe collapse of cod.It's difficult to imagine thattwo, or some historians would say three world warswere fought during the colonial erafor the control of cod.Cod fed most of the people of Western Europe.It fed the slavesbrought to the Antilles,the song "Jamaica Farewell" --"Ackee rice salt fish are nice" --is an emblem of the importanceof salt cod from northeastern Canada.It all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s:35,000 people lost their jobs.And that was the beginningof a kind of serial depletionfrom bigger and tastier speciesto smaller and not-so-tasty species,from species that were near to hometo species that were all around the world,and what have you.It's a little hard to understand that,because you can go to a Costco in the United Statesand buy cheap fish.You ought to read the label to find out where it came from,but it's still cheap,and everybody thinks it's okay.

4:55
It's hard to communicate this,and one way that I think is really interestingis to talk about sport fish,because people like to go out and catch fish.It's one of those things.This picture here shows the trophy fish,the biggest fish caughtby people who pay a lot of moneyto get on a boat,go to a place off of Key West in Florida,drink a lot of beer,throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water,come back with the biggest and the best fish,and the champion trophy fishare put on this board, where people take a picture,and this guy is obviouslyreally excited about that fish.Well, that's what it's like now,but this is what it was like in the 1950sfrom the same boat in the same placeon the same board on the same dock.The trophy fishwere so bigthat you couldn't put any of those small fish up on it.And the average size trophy fishweighed 250 to 300 pounds, goliath grouper,and if you wanted to go out and kill something,you could pretty much count onbeing able to catch one of those fish.And they tasted really good.And people paid less in 1950 dollarsto catch thatthan what people pay nowto catch those little, tiny fish.And that's everywhere.

6:19
It's not just the fish, though,that are disappearing.Industrial fishing uses big stuff,big machinery.We use nets that are 20 miles long.We use longlinesthat have one million or two million hooks.And we trawl,which means to take somethingthe size of a tractor trailer truckthat weighs thousands and thousands of pounds,put it on a big chain,and drag it across the sea floorto stir up the bottom and catch the fish.Think of it asbeing kind of the bulldozing of a cityor of a forest,because it clears it away.And the habitat destructionis unbelievable.This is a photograph,a typical photograph,of what the continental shelvesof the world look like.You can see the rows in the bottom,the way you can see the rowsin a field that has just been plowedto plant corn.What that was, was a forest of sponges and coral,which is a critical habitatfor the development of fish.What it is now is mud,and the area of the ocean floorthat has been transformed from forestto level mud, to parking lot,is equivalent to the entire areaof all the foreststhat have ever been cut downon all of the earthin the history of humanity.We've managed to do thatin the last 100 to 150 years.

7:56
We tend to think of oil spillsand mercuryand we hear a lot about plastic these days.And all of that stuff is really disgusting,but what's really insidiousis the biological pollution that happensbecause of the magnitude of the shiftsthat it causesto entire ecosystems.And I'm going to just talk very brieflyabout two kinds of biological pollution:one is introduced speciesand the other is what comes from nutrients.So this is the infamousCaulerpa taxifolia,the so-called killer algae.A book was written about it.It's a bit of an embarrassment.It was accidentally releasedfrom the aquarium in Monaco,it was bred to be cold tolerantto have in peoples aquaria.It's very pretty,and it has rapidly startedto overgrowthe once very richbiodiversity of thenorthwestern Mediterranean.I don't know how many of you remember the movie"The Little Shop of Horrors,"but this is the plant of "The Little Shop of Horrors."But, instead of devouring the people in the shop,what it's doing is overgrowingand smotheringvirtually all of the bottom-dwelling lifeof the entire northwesternMediterranean Sea.We don't know anything that eats it,we're trying to do all sorts of geneticsand figure out something that could be done,but, as it stands, it's the monster from hell,about which nobody knows what to do.

9:33
Now another form of pollutionthat's biological pollutionis what happens from excess nutrients.The green revolution,all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we use too much of it.It's subsidized, which is one of the reasons we used too much of it.It runs down the rivers,and it feeds the plankton,the little microscopic plant cellsin the coastal water.But since we ate all the oystersand we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton,there's nothing to eat the planktonand there's more and more of it,so it dies of old age,which is unheard of for plankton.And when it dies, it falls to the bottomand then it rots,which means that bacteria break it down.And in the processthey use up all the oxygen,and in using up all the oxygenthey make the environment utterly lethalfor anything that can't swim away.So, what we end up withis a microbial zoodominated by bacteriaand jellyfish, as you seeon the left in front of you.And the only fishery left --and it is a commercial fishery --is the jellyfish fisheryyou see on the right, where there used to be prawns.Even in Newfoundlandwhere we used to catch cod,we now have a jellyfish fishery.

10:49
And another version of this sort of thingis what is often called red tidesor toxic blooms.That picture on the left is just staggering to me.I have talked about it a million times,but it's unbelievable.In the upper right of that picture on the leftis almost the Mississippi Delta,and the lower left of that pictureis the Texas-Mexico border.You're looking at the entirenorthwestern Gulf of Mexico;you're looking at one toxicdinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish,made by that beautiful little creatureon the lower right.And in the upper right you see thisblack sort of cloudmoving ashore.That's the same species.And as it comes to shore and the wind blows,and little droplets of the water get into the air,the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill upwith people with acute respiratory distress.And that's retirement homeson the west coast of Florida.A friend and I did this thing in Hollywoodwe called Hollywood ocean night,and I was trying to figure out how toexplain to actors what's going on.And I said,"So, imagine you're in a movie called 'Escape from Malibu'because all the beautiful people have movedto North Dakota, where it's clean and safe.And the only people who are left thereare the people who can't affordto move away from the coast,because the coast, instead of being paradise,is harmful to your health."

12:14
And then this is amazing.It was when I was on holiday last early autumn in France.This is from the coast of Brittany,which is being envelopedin this green, algal slime.The reason that it attracted so much attention,besides the fact that it's disgusting,is that sea birds flying over itare asphyxiated by the smell and die,and a farmer died of it,and you can imagine the scandal that happened.And so there's this warbetween the farmersand the fishermen about it all,and the net result is thatthe beaches of Brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuffon a regular basis.

12:54
And then, of course, there's climate change,and we all know about climate change.I guess the iconic figure of itis the melting of the icein the Arctic Sea.Think about the thousands and thousands of people who diedtrying to find the Northwest Passage.Well, the Northwest Passage is already there.I think it's sort of funny;it's on the Siberian coast,maybe the Russians will charge tolls.The governments of the worldare taking this really seriously.The military of the Arctic nationsis taking it really seriously.For all the denial of climate changeby government leaders,the CIAand the navies of Norwayand the U.S. and Canada, whateverare busily thinking abouthow they will secure their territoryin this inevitabilityfrom their point of view.And, of course, Arctic communities are toast.

13:52
The other kinds of effects of climate change --this is coral bleaching. It's a beautiful picture, right?All that white coral.Except it's supposed to be brown.What happens is thatthe corals are a symbiosis,and they have these little algal cellsthat live inside them.And the algae give the corals sugar,and the corals give the algaenutrients and protection.But when it gets too hot,the algae can't make the sugar.The corals say, "You cheated. You didn't pay your rent."They kick them out, and then they die.Not all of them die; some of them survive,some more are surviving,but it's really bad news.To try and give you a sense of this,imagine you go camping in Julysomewhere in Europe or in North America,and you wake up the next morning, and you look around you,and you see that 80 percent of the trees,as far as you can see,have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked.And you come home, and you discoverthat 80 percent of all the treesin North America and in Europehave dropped their leaves.And then you read in the paper a few weeks later,"Oh, by the way, a quarter of those died."Well, that's what happened in the Indian Oceanduring the 1998 El Nino,an area vastly greaterthan the size of North America and Europe,when 80 percent of all the corals bleachedand a quarter of them died.

15:15
And then the really scary thingabout all of this --the overfishing, the pollution and the climate change --is that each thing doesn't happen in a vacuum.But there are these, what we call, positive feedbacks,the synergies among themthat make the whole vastly greaterthan the sum of the parts.And the great scientific challengefor people like me in thinking about all this,is do we know howto put Humpty Dumpty back together again?I mean, because we, at this point, we can protect it.But what does that mean?We really don't know.

15:53
So what are the oceans going to be likein 20 or 50 years?Well, there won't be any fishexcept for minnows,and the water will be pretty dirty,and all those kinds of thingsand full of mercury, etc., etc.And dead zones will get bigger and biggerand they'll start to merge,and we can imagine something likethe dead-zonificationof the global, coastal ocean.Then you sure won't want to eat fish that were raised in it,because it would be a kind ofgastronomic Russian roulette.Sometimes you have a toxic bloom;sometimes you don't.That doesn't sell.

16:37
The really scary things thoughare the physical, chemical,oceanographic things that are happening.As the surface of the ocean gets warmer,the water is lighter when it's warmer,it becomes harder and harderto turn the ocean over.We say it becomesmore strongly stratified.The consequence of that is thatall those nutrientsthat fuel the great anchoveta fisheries,of the sardines of Californiaor in Peru or whatever,those slow downand those fisheries collapse.And, at the same time,water from the surface, which is rich in oxygen,doesn't make it downand the ocean turns into a desert.

17:26
So the question is: How are we allgoing to respond to this?And we can doall sorts of things to fix it,but in the final analysis,the thing we really need to fixis ourselves.It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution;it's not about the climate change.It's about usand our greed and our need for growthand our inability to imagine a worldthat is different from the selfish worldwe live in today.So the question is: Will we respond to this or not?I would say that the future of lifeand the dignity of human beingsdepends on our doing that.